No, I don't. I clearly say in my post that we should be actively avoiding sites with annoying ads and going to sites without them, not blocking all ads and still going. Doing that would reward sites without frustrating ads and weed out those with.

Again, this puts the onus on the consumer instead of the site operator. I am not wasting my time watching ad rotations to figure out which sites I like based on what ads they rotate. I'm not going to get into "rewarding" site owners because that's just silly. I come to look at information, not reward people. Site owners will always have a problem with this scenario regardless of what a consumer does until people perceive information to have value on the web.

Instead we're weeding out everything. To take that metaphor further, it's like spraying your lawn with bleach to kill weeds rather than simply using weedkiller. You're getting rid of the good and the bad and promoting no growth.

It's not my lawn is the point. My neighbor let people put signs all over his lawn and I got tired of looking at it so we put up a fence. Getting out of the realm of ridiculous comparisons for a moment, Flash ads can have a tendency to crash browsers for example and that's not getting into security vulnerabilities and problems that have cropped up with ad networks letting in malware over the years. In the case of Arstechnica they specifically approve every single ad but I doubt thats the norm even around here.

But they pay for a finite amount of things, typically very small. If every site went pay-only you'd see the amount of people on SomethingAwful drop, as they'd spend their money elsewhere.

No you wouldn't. It's $10 for life and the site has steadily grown through out the years because it's feature base has as well. They have literally made a forum membership into a product and done so successfully. They also manage to survive despite having a tech-savvy userbase that's quite capable of ad blocking, in fact it was one of the primary motivators in starting it.

Did you even read the article? They get paid per click and paid per view. It's the views they're concerned about - adblockers prevent these. Have you seen the prices even simple sites charge? Some well exceed $15 CPV. If your site gets 150k uniques a day that's about $82,000 a year. In views.

Did you even read my comment, specifically the part where I said I fully read the article? I know all about CPM versus CPC and most adblockers do not prevent CPM. The "hit" is still delivered and registered in most adblockers that I've seen, if you know differently then feel free to link it up. The ad networks are starting to use JavaScript to detect Adblockers is the real issue here but ultimately it's all ignoring the fact that CPM is not a useful ad method for most websites OTHER than making revenue for the site operator.

CPM advertising is generally for incredibly high viewer membership websites and most of those tend to not be tech related, in fact I can think of less than 5 tech websites that would be doing ~$100k in CPM ads. CPM is most useful at brand awareness and general advertising. CPC is far better suited for small to medium sized websites and targeted advertising in general. The trouble with CPC is that you have to show content that people might ever be interested in clicking on and most ad networks manage to even fail at this basic concept. Hence our current situation.

If your business model is relying on people just to be nice and do something to that's largely to their own detriment, I'm sorry but you're a much more hopeful person I will ever be. I am simply more realistic than you about the situation. There are people who will whitelist Bluesnews because they want to "support" it but the vast majority will simply be indifferent. You cannot hope for anything from that portion, you simply cater your content to the casual crowd who probably makes up a huge portion of the viewership and try not to piss them off by showing appropriate ads, filtering out malware and etc. Alternatively you carve out a niche for yourself and charge for whatever you can get away with.

I can sympathize with small to medium sized website owners in many respects but that is the market they chose to enter. One with few barriers of entry and significant competition requiring no formal educational requirements. You take the good with the bad.